Chapter 19: 19 – Ondine: Plague Island

My first morning in Ballaig, I awoke to the smell of fresh baking, and to the soothing sounds of Pearl moving around in the kitchen downstairs. I washed as best I could in the small sink in the corner of the room, then went downstairs early for my shift. I didn’t take it out of the bag, but I was acutely aware of Jenny’s journal resting there, and its power both thrilled and unnerved me.

Pearl seemed genuinely happy that I wanted to help her with the day’s baking, and we worked together harmoniously in the kitchen, talking very little. I respected her for somehow knowing that I’m not a morning person, and not forcing me into conversation. When the first customers arrived in the café just after we opened the doors at eight o’clock, Pearl introduced me and I began my first-ever job as a waitress. I wasn’t a model employee at first – maybe Pearl would say not ever – shy, too anxious to remember everything people asked for, easily flustered and confused. But everyone was kind, and the day passed without any major incident.

I was so naïve then, that I didn’t even try to hide the fact of my lineage with Jenny. I didn’t know then that she had disappeared from Ballaig at the same time as the mass deaths, so I had no reason to hide anything. I didn’t speak her name, just told anyone who asked that she was a healer in the village generations ago, and that I had come to Ballaig as a kind of pilgrimage to see where she had lived and grown up.

My second night alone in the room above the café, the journal showed me another animated scene of Jenny’s life, on the first page. Mr. Samson Cat did not appear; instead, I was looking at a coastal cliff, wildflowers swaying in the breeze, hearing the sound of a young girl humming a tune I didn’t recognize. The page turned by itself, and on the next, blank page, a drawing of a Scottish primrose appeared, followed by the words:

Mother said primula Scotica only grows in the far north, so how did these five flowers get here? Who carried them here from afar, in a pocket or in a beak? Or perhaps this is an enchanted place? Each flower has five heart-shaped petals and a yellow heart, their glorious faces raised up to the sun.

A soft breeze blew through the room, ruffling the page, even though the window was fully closed. A coconut-aroma wafted in with the gentle wind, and a new illustration appeared on the facing page, with the caption:

Whin - the Goddess of Winter. A treasure in late winter and early spring, for its sunshine-coloured flowers and sweet scent that fills the air, like something that can be eaten.

I recognized the yellow blossoms of gorse, a thorny beauty I’d always loved.

The breeze returned, and the page flipped over, coinciding with a new scent in the room, of citrus mixed with honey. A green-fronded plant with cerise bottle-brush blooms appeared alongside these words:

Honey myrtle, bog myrtle, myrica gale – Only one bush grows at the base of the cliff on the shore. Fills the air with honey scent. Mother makes a sweet-bitter tea that repels biting bugs, but gives me strange dreams, of men with blue faces chasing me through a forest.

For more than an hour, Jenny’s journal revealed its sweet secrets to me, her drawings accompanied by hand-written information about each of the plants. The entire time, the voice I assumed to be Jenny’s hummed, a gentle breeze accompanied each new drawing, and with it the scent of the plant I was looking at or, in the case of unscented plants, the smell of the sea air, like I was out walking the coastal path.

It was May when I arrived in Ballaig, the days increasingly long as we drew closer to the summer solstice, so there were a few hours of daylight remaining when my shifts at the café ended. At the end of every shift, I headed for the coastal cliffs, spending hours in a self-directed scavenger hunt of the plants in Jenny’s journal. Whenever I found one of the plants Jenny had written about – and especially if it was in the same location as Jenny had found it over a hundred years previously – a sharp thrill coursed through me.

You could say I was high on this strange, uncanny connection between Jenny – my long-dead ancestor – and me.

It lasted two weeks, and then I met Elena, and everything started to change.

I was on my way back to my room above the café after another invigorating walk along the cliffs, looking in the windows of shops that had closed for the day. I’d stopped in front of Ballaig Boat Tours, intrigued by a poster advertising half-day tours to Nester Island. The poster read:

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Are you brave enough to set foot on this haunted island? A plague island, sometimes called the island of the damned because those afflicted by deathly contagious diseases were quarantined there on and off for centuries, it is said Nester Island is haunted by those who died lonely, excruciating deaths. This half-day tour will take you to this island grave, where you can explore the site where the doomed were nursed – or cursed, depending on which legend you believe – in their final days.

The description of the island was bad enough, but I found that as I looked at the photograph of Nester Island – hulking in the sea like an angry, black beast – it flickered, like a light was flashing on and off behind it. And then I saw it – another, smaller island appeared in the frame, to the east of Nester Island, where I was sure nothing had been visible before. I’d seen Nester Island before, of course, when I was walking the coastal path, but hadn’t paid it much attention. I was sure I’d never seen a second island, though.

I leaned closer to the window, trying to get a better look at the smaller island. A voice from behind me said, “They’ve got a strange approach to marketing, don’t they?” I was so startled I swore as I turned to see who was speaking to me. The tall woman looked guilty when she saw my reaction. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to give you a fright.”

I apologized for swearing, and she said, “Not at all – I shouldn’t have snuck up on you. So, are you thinking of taking a trip to the island?’

“Nester Island, or the other one?”

The woman’s eyes widened. “You can see two of them?”

I looked back at the poster, to see that both islands were still there. “I could have sworn there was only one there to begin with, though.”

That was how I met Elena. I didn’t know then that she knew there was something different about me, because I could see Hallowtide. She was very subtle about approaching the subject with me; in fact, she enabled someone else to raise the subject, when she invited me to attend a book signing with her, where the author’s experiences with witchcraft were front and centre. At that point, I still hadn’t learned about Jenny’s suspicious disappearance at the time of the mass deaths in Ballaig. However, reading about Nester Island on the poster had piqued my interest, and I’d learned more about its terrible history.

The island was a lazaretto, or a quarantine island, where the sick and infirm were taken – from ships, sometimes, but more often from the mainland – to be nursed back to health or, as more often was the case, to die. The main purpose of quarantining them on Nester Island was to confine their contagious diseases so that they did not spread to the healthy population. But something no one has ever been able to explain happened on the island in the 1600s: thirty-one patients, along with the woman from Ballaig who’d been tasked with their care, disappeared without a trace.

No bodies were ever found, on the island or washed up somewhere on the coast. Some rumours had it that pirates stole them, or sea beasts took them. But the most persistent rumour held that the woman from Ballaig was a witch, who’d used witchcraft to kill everyone, and make their bodies disappear.

Because this happened near the beginning of the witch hunts and trials in Scotland, Ballaig’s reputation as a dangerous place, with the most evil coven of witches, was established. As a result, it was a dangerous place to live, because of the frequent visits by witch hunters. More women (and some men) were accused of witchcraft there than anywhere else in Scotland.

The village became widely known as “the witches’ village”, a label which has lasted until the present day. Ballaig attracts visitors throughout the year who want a glimpse of its dark history, perhaps imagining it as a Scottish Salem. The author who was coming to do a book signing in the village book shop, Kate McGrane, claimed to be able to communicate with women who were accused of witchcraft during the time of the witch hunts and trials.

Kate was the first person I told about my ability to communicate with Jenny, through her journal.

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